Their emulator for android right now is really good, while buggy it's doing stuff I would have never expected from DC emulation on a tegra 3 (ouya)
So i'm guessing that they want to keep control of their code and such? doesn't that fall down to what software packages they are using and if any fall under fair use and all that shit?
That's actually an interesting question, from a legal perspective (I can see everyone starting to snooze.) Generally, in copyright law, you're only able to protect the aspects of a work that have some sort of originality, but not the functional elements. So if you have a Dreamcast emulator, you could, for example, copyright the overall design of the emulator if you have something kinda frilly, but not the actual processes that run games. Ultimately, it would come down to what, specifically, these guys are trying to keep control of here. I have my doubts that they'd be able to copyright much in the first place.
But anyway, let's assume they have something they can copyright. The devs are trying to protect against people producing derivative works. We'd basically be under a Microstar v. Formgen analysis, and would likely find that use of the copyrighted work would
not be protected by fair use. But a lot of this turns to the amount and substantiality of the work that the derivative author borrowed.
In short, I'm really bored and need to get out more.